Giuseppe Fiori

Market Reforms at the Zero Lower Bound

This paper studies the impact of product and labor market reforms when the economy faces major slack and a binding constraint on monetary policy easing. such as the zero lower bound. To this end, we build a two-country model with endogenous producer entry, labor market frictions, and nominal rigidities. We find that while the effect of market reforms depends on the cyclical conditions under which they are implemented, the zero lower bound itself does not appear to matter. In fact, when carried out in a recession, the impact of reforms is typically stronger when the zero lower bound is binding. The reason is that reforms are inflationary in our structural model (or they have no noticeable deflationary effects). Thus, contrary to the implications of reduced-form modeling of product and labor market reforms as exogenous reductions in price and wage markups, our analysis shows that there is no simple across-the-board relationship between market reforms and the behavior of real marginal costs. This significantly alters the consequences of the zero (or any effective) lower bound on policy rates.

The Aging of the Baby Boomers: Demographics and Propagation of Tax Shocks

We investigate the consequences of demographic change for the effects of tax cuts in the United States over the post-WWII period. Using narratively identified tax changes as proxies for structural shocks, we establish that the responsiveness of unemployment rates to tax changes largely varies across age groups: the unemployment rate response of the young is nearly twice as large as that of prime-age workers. Such heterogeneity is the channel through which shifts in the age composition of the labor force impact the response of the aggregate U.S. unemployment rate to tax cuts. We find that the aging of the Baby Boomers considerably reduces the effects of tax cuts on unemployment.